Cheryl's Mewsings

And if a sports post doesn’t put people off, maybe a trans rights post will.

Some of you may have wondered, at times, why trans people are so paranoid about ID schemes, full body security scanners, and even answering census questions honestly. Here’s an example. Last week a trans woman from San Francisco went into her local Department of Motor Vehicles office to have changes made to her driving license so that it matched her new name and gender. This is all perfectly legal, and the process went through without a hitch. Until Monday, when she:

received a letter from the person who had processed her name change at the DMV. In the letter, which had been mailed to her at home, the DMV employee quoted from the Bible and stated that Amber had made a “very evil decision.” The strongly-worded letter told Amber that she was “an abomination” and said that homosexuals should be put to death.

Further details from Monica Roberts. My friends at the Transgender Law Center are doing what they can for Amber, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the DMV employee in question now has a very expensive lawyer and a bunch of well-financed “Christian” pressure groups lining up to provide protection. The local papers will doubtless be full of people whining about the need for “freedom of religion.” Yes, even in San Francisco.

Because, you know, what chance do trans people have when even Glee finds the word “transsexual” too disgusting to use on television? At Entertainment Weekly, Margaret Lyons is bemused.

Update: And I almost forgot to mention, when Apple’s famously censorious App store thinks demeaning trans people is perfectly OK.

And yes, it might only have been a letter, but the creep in question now knows where Amber lives. From yesterday’s L.A. Times:

Los Angeles police investigators are seeking five suspects in connection with an attack on a transgender woman in Hollywood that left the 25-year-old victim bloodied and battered with a broken jaw and cheek bone.

The victim had just left a bar near the intersection of La Brea and Melrose avenues in the wee hours of Oct. 1 when she was attacked by three women and two men.

According to witnesses, the attackers were beating and kicking the victim in the middle of the street, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Mitzi Grasso. The victim was kicked in the face and was hit on the head with a bottle, leaving cuts on the victim’s neck.

For those of you not keeping score at home (for which I don’t blame you in the slightest), here’s the list of trans people known to have been murdered in 2010.

It appears I have a bunch of new readers thanks to a tweet by Cat Valente. Now I’m probably going to lose a bunch of them again by making a sports post.

You know, I really shouldn’t be watching the World Series (and I’m not watching it live as it is on in the middle of the night). Pictures of that beautiful City by the Bay inevitably make me sad, and I can’t listen to that Tony Bennett song these days without crying. But how can I not watch, when Kevin and I have spent so many happy evenings in that ballpark? (Not to mention so many happy evenings freezing our butts off in Candlestick Park before they built the new stadium at Emperor Norton Field.) We lived through the disaster of 2002 together. I can’t desert the Giants now.

I should add, also, that there’s a curse to be laid. English cricket has three major tournaments in the year, not just one. Somerset finished second in all three. It can’t happen to the Giants as well, can it?

And, like all great sporting events, there’s a story to this World Series. The Giants have come through a pretty bad period since 2002. For much of the last few years they have been held together by one guy: Bengie Molina. The catcher is always the heart of a baseball team, and up until recently Molina was also one of the few men that the Giants could rely upon to deliver runs. As a veteran catcher, he played a key role in developing two young players: Tim Lincecum, the ace pitcher who has won two Cy Young awards, and Buster Posey, the kid being groomed as Molina’s replacement.

In June this year the Giants’ management decided that it was finally time for Posey to take his place in the starting lineup, and Molina was traded to the Texas Rangers. One of the idiosyncrasies about baseball is that teams in the National League and American League very rarely play each other, and so rarely develop rivalries. Despite the Rangers having once been part-owned by George W. Bush, the Giants and the Rangers seem to have maintained friendly relations down the years. Will Clark, who helped take the Giants to the 1989 World Series (the one interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake), was also traded to the Rangers. Molina has apparently remained on good terms with his former teammates, even helping coach Lincecum through a bad patch earlier in the season.

Bengie is also, of course, in the unenviable position of going into the World Series knowing that he will be credited with being part of the winning side, no matter who wins. Though, like any professional sportsman, he’ll be trying his utmost to help the Rangers triumph.

Good sporting events also spring surprises. Last night’s matchup between Lincecum and Cliff Lee was billed as the pitching duel of the year, Lee also being a former Cy Young winner. Instead the Giants, a team that could not hit its way out of a paper bag at times this season, piled on the runs on the way to an 11-8 victory. Goodness only knows what will happen tonight. Maybe the Giants will actually score some runs behind Matt Cain for once. I hope so.

It is World Fantasy this coming weekend. Many of my friends are already on their way there. Assuming the weather doesn’t cause havoc (there were tornadoes in Ohio yesterday and some people’s flights have already been delayed) it will be a busy event. Obviously I can’t go, because it is in the USA. I won’t be doing much reporting either. Various things that happened at last year’s event, and in the past week, have led to me deciding that it would be politic for me to just ignore WFC.

That does mean no live reporting of the awards. But don’t worry, I’m sure someone will be tweeting the results. I’ll certainly be keeping a close eye on Twitter in case Neil and Sean get to collect a Howie. I understand that Mike Willmoth will be posting commentary. I’m sure John Scalzi will as well. There should be no lack of reportage.

As you doubtless all know by now, Neil Gaiman has suggested that on Hallowe’en we all give each other scary books. All Hallow’s Read, as the new tradition is called, has been swiftly endorsed by other writers and critics, including Stephen King and the Washington Post.

I’m not a big fan of horror myself, but there is a book coming out this week that I fancy giving myself for Hallowe’en. It is a graphic novel adaption of H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, and judging from this FPI review, it is very good.

I’m still peripherally involved in running SFSFC conventions, even though I can’t attend any of them. The next one we have coming up is SMOFcon 28, which will take place in San José in December. SMOFcon is a convention about con running which, amongst other things, helps to spread knowledge of best practices throughout the fan community.

When SMOFcon is in other parts of the world we normally give out scholarships to local Bay Area fans who might otherwise be unable to afford to attend. I’m pleased to see that this year CanSMOF, the parent organization of the 2009 (Montréal) Worldcon, is giving out a couple of scholarships. One of those is for a Canadian fan (congratulations Kent Pollard), but CanSMOF decided to open up the second scholarship to fans from anywhere in the world, and I’m delighted to see that it has been awarded to Norm Cates of the New Zealand in 2020 Worldcon bid. That’s an excellent use of the idea.

I have just put the program schedule for BristolCon up on the website. I think MEG and Roz have done a really creative job with it. We are small con (currently edging up to 100 members) and we wanted to stick with a single track of programming, but at the same time we have a huge number of great writers attending. So we have gone for a series of rapid-fire readings between each program item, and also a mass signing (after the style of World Fantasy). The latter has been cunningly scheduled at lunch time because it is something that most people don’t have to be at for the whole hour.

I have two program items. The first is interviewing Joe Abercrombie, which will be a pleasure. The other is a panel on writing fight scenes.

As you know, I don’t write fiction — at least I don’t write good fiction — so what am I doing on that panel? Well, I foolishly told our programming team that I’d be happy to do any panel they wanted. That particular panel has John Meaney and Juliet McKenna talking about their martial arts skills, and Joe talking about whacking people with swords. Colin Harvey has nobly volunteered to keep them all from whacking each other. And me…

So we have martial artists/authors John Meaney and Juliet McKenna on hand to guide you through the mechanics of writing fight scenes, and maybe, if you’re lucky, demonstrate some moves on our other unsuspecting panellists…

So, if you want to see John and Juliet using me as a punchbag, memberships are available here.

It looks as if the long-running “Moongate” saga is coming to an end at last. From today’s World SF News I learned that Wiscon has decided to rescind their invitation to Elizabeth Moon to be one of their Guests of Honor for next year on account of the bizarre Islamophobic blog post she made earlier this year.

From a con-running point of view, this is a highly contentious issue. I don’t think anyone who has been involved in running a convention, or being a Guest of Honor, will be entirely comfortable about this. From one point of view it seems very much like a witchhunt was launched against Moon, and that the convention caved in to pressure. Exactly the same tactics could be used to force another convention to rescind an invitation to a guest because she is lesbian, or a feminist. Indeed, I’m sure someone out there in fandom is just itching to launch such a campaign.

But no decision takes place in a vacuum, and this one has taken a long time to happen. I’m sure that much discussion took place, both in public and in private. At least some people claim to have talked to Moon. Possibly they hoped she would issue some sort of retraction. Obviously she hasn’t done so, or we would have heard about it.

The public reaction has included discussion of the most suitable response, should Moon stay as a GoH. This has, to some extent, had the beneficial effect of putting the issue in the limelight. All sorts of people have written excellent posts challenging what Moon wrote. But at the same time Muslim and PoC fans were unhappy that they were being, as they saw it, required to defend their right to be at Wiscon. And many people simply didn’t want the atmosphere of the convention ruined by demonstrations. I suspect that quite a few people simply decided not to go this year. Membership take-up comparisons with previous years would be interesting.

It is worth noting that the decision to rescind Moon’s GoHship appears to have been taken by Wiscon’s parent organization, not by the convention committee itself. This is exactly the sort of thing that parent organizations are for. A convention committee is almost certainly personally invested in the decisions it has taken. They may see the attacks on Moon as personal attacks against themselves. The parent organization is not so closely involved. Also it is less interested in the current year’s event, and more in the long term health of the convention. You have to assume that they felt the affair was doing Wiscon a lot of damage.

My own feelings on this have been very conflicted. As a Director of an organization that runs conventions I find the whole thing very scary, and I quite understand that many authors feel that a bad precedent has been set.

I’m also generally opposed to the whole “with us or against us” attitude that seems to have driven much of the debate. Moon’s comments might have been abominable, but I’m sure that there are very many Americans, and indeed British people, who think pretty much the same things. They have all been listening to the nonsense pumped out by the popular media over issues like the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque”, and now apparently a new panic about Islamic superheroes. Had this turned into an opportunity to get Moon to change her mind, it would have been a good thing. That hasn’t happened, and possibly the ferocity of the original response played a part in that.

Mostly, however, I don’t go in for confrontation on issues like this because I don’t expect to win. I’m so used to being patted on the head and told that the concerns of trans people are not a political priority, and that complaining will only make us more unpopular, that I have internalized that idea. I tend to opt for consciousness raising rather than confrontation. Why jump up and down and yell and get people hating you if you are only going to lose?

Look, for example, at what happened last year when Stonewall chose the rabidly transphobic Julie Bindel as their Journalist of the Year. My friends in London demonstrated outside the award ceremony, but the British LG community closed ranks and thumbed their noses. So much so that they have nominated another transphobic journalist this year: Bill Leckie, who has even drawn criticism from Stonewall Scotland for one of his offensive articles.

Given the way that feminism goes, I’m sure that Wiscon has had transphobic GoHs in the past. I suspect it will in future. One of the reasons I stopped going to Wiscon was that it became clear to me that I was the wrong sort of trans person for them. If I wanted to be more open about myself, Wiscon would not be a safe space for me. So I stopped going, rather than complain.

But you know, strange things happen. Because also in my morning blog feeds today was this article from Pink News. What do you know, Stonewall has caved too! Maybe yelling does work after all.

So where are we? Have we found ourselves in a world of mob rule where anyone with a following on the Internet can hound innocent writers and convention committees into doing their bidding? Or have we found ourselves in a world in which the ignorant expression of hatred for people you have defined as different, and therefore inferior and immoral, has become socially unacceptable?

If you need any further proof that we now live in The Future, consider this: The Economist is blogging about the effect of robots on labour markets.

Of course, like any good pundit, they hedge their case:

Of course, full human employment may not be a part of a sentient robot overlord’s grand plan. As always, politics constrains economics, and so it’s difficult to make good predictions about future labour markets without knowledge of the institutional environment the machines will put in place once they become self-aware and enslave humanity.

And no mention of Asimov, presumably because it is no longer necessary.

First up, the boss man, Mr. Neil Clarke, has recently been interviewed by The Functional Nerds, a fine podcast. You can hear what he has to say here.

In addition Realms of Fantasy magazine has announced that it is once again closing for business. This is very sad, and as the official announcement says it is probably a result of the current economic downturn. However, I learned from Twitter that more privately (to his friends on Facebook) Warren Lapine has been blaming the fold on free online magazines such as Clarkesworld.

I’ve not seen what Warren actually wrote, and I suspect he’s mainly just a bit upset, but my own view is that if online magazines are doing better than print ones it is because they are more accessible rather than anything else. One of the main reasons that Clarkesworld has such good content is that we pay very well (and are picky about what we publish). And we are able to pay well because people give us money. It is a virtuous circle. The better the content you publish, the more money you get, and the better content you can afford.

That goes double for Salon Futura because we pay rather better for non-fiction than many print magazines. Often people who write book reviews get “paid” with the copy of the book they are reviewing. And I’ll never forget being told by the editor of one long-running print magazine that, as a fan, I should of course be happy to write for him for free. I hope that Salon Futura will establish that you can have good quality discussion of speculative literature online, not just the “my opinion” pieces we see from so many book review sites. Of course it will help if we get a few donations, because then we’ll be able to afford to pay better for the material.

Many of you will have seen the open letter that China Miéville wrote to Facebook (and if not it was first posted here). Deanna has since tweeted that Facebook has finally acted to remove the fake profiles, but China shouldn’t have had to go through all of that trouble, and what hope does someone less famous and less eloquent have?

Personally I detest Facebook. Every time they make a change they manage to make your average used car salesman seem like a paragon of honesty in comparison. Their whole business philosophy appears to be based on tricking people to add things to their profiles and then making it incredibly difficult to get rid of those things. The only reason I have a presence there is that there are lots of people whose interaction with the Internet appears to be only via Facebook. If I want those people to read my blogs and tweets I have to be on Facebook.

However, some words of warning. Firstly, if you want to send me a private message, don’t use Facebook. Use email. My contact details are not hard to find. Facebook may claim that what you are writing will remain private between you and me, but at any time it could end up leaking that information (and it probably claims copyright over it as well).

In addition, if you want to respond to one of my tweets, or comment on a blog post, please be aware that I may only check Facebook once a day or less. You’ll get a much faster response on Twitter, and I’d much rather have blog comments on the blog where they belong.

Today the excellent Mr. Scalzi (should I refer to him as President Scalzi now?) has a very fine post about privilege.

No, they are not bidding against London for a Worldcon. This is a much better idea.

James Shields was this year’s GUFF delegate. As such he got to visit the New Zealand Natcon as well as Aussiecon 4. Inspired by how well that worked, James came up with the idea of having a convention in Dublin a week after the (presumed) London Worldcon. After all, lots of Americans will be coming over for Worldcon, and we all know how Americans love to visit Ireland. James is bidding to be a Eurocon as well. Pre-supports are only €5. Kevin and I have already joined. More details here.

Well, that was Octocon. Nice little convention.

On the plus side, they have a good hotel in a great city, and this year had a totally awesome guest. They also have a lot of enthusiasm. If I were more interested in film I’d be talking a lot about the Golden Blasters (winners here).

On the negative side, things were a bit chaotic. Of course that was in part because they didn’t know whether any of the Game of Thrones cast would turn up (kudos to Kristian Nairn for having the courage to do so), and with a con that small it doesn’t matter much if the program changes.

Personally I had a fun weekend meeting up with my Irish friends, with George & Parris, with Lorraine (who I had never met before) and a bunch of other interesting overseas visitors (hello Martina, Natalie, Monza, Katie). I didn’t get the interview with George, because by the time he was free of obligations he looked as exhausted as I felt. Neither of us would have been very good. I’m not sure that I’ll be back, mainly because these days I can’t afford the time or money to do conventions. Things will look up again when I have a bunch of books to promote and have a prospect of selling stuff at conventions.

Because I didn’t interview George I want to return to what he said about writing in his GoH speech, but that will need to be a separate post, and will need me to be more awake to write it.

I wrote a fairly lengthy post yesterday summarizing what George had to say in his GoH session yesterday, but the WordPress app for the iPad ate it, and I’m not sure it is worth re-doing because mostly it said, “there’s nothing new, mainly because George isn’t allowed to talk about it.”

I am still hoping to get an interview, but the convention is working George fairly hard. He had a signing and a 2-hour panel yesterday. He has another signing and two more panels today. And as always there’s a bunch of Brotherhood members here wanting to do things with him and keeping him up late. I’m not going to intrude.

One thing I should mention from yesterday is that George claims to have stayed up late thanks to a magic drink made from the blood of a red bull. The Donn Cuailnge was brown, and Queen Maeve’s bull was white, but it seems entirely likely that there should be a magical red bull in Ireland.

I probably won’t blog again until I get home tomorrow night. Tweetage, however, will happen.

The Camden Court is a nice, modern hotel. Everything looks very smart and new. The toilets are very spacious, and have those clever sinks where you just have to wave your hands and water appears. Except it doesn’t. If you wave your hand, nothing happens. You can wave until you are blue in the face and no water appears. There is a trick to these sinks. The only way to get water is to bring your hands together from either side. Yes, only in Ireland do they have the sinks configured so that in order to get water you have to pray.

Hello world. I am in Dublin for Octocon. I’ve been offline for a day or so due to lack of Internet access. I’m staying at a friend’s apartment rather than in the con hotel. However, I am now at the con, and the hotel wifi is working OK in the lobby. People are in the bar, and I plan to go and join them soon.

The place I am staying is very nice, sandwiched between a lovely park and the Royal Dublin Showgrounds. Leinster, and indeed Ireland, have played at the RDS, though with Croke Park now opened up as a rugby venue and the renovations as Lansdowne Road finished I don’t suppose they will do so much in future. In any case, BOD and the boys are playing Saracens at Wembley tomorrow so I won’t have any distractions from the convention.

The first people I saw on arriving at the con hotel were George & Parris. As George noted, the last time I saw them was on the other side of the world and we were both waving around large, chrome-plated phallic symbols. We seem to keep running into each other. George has been checking in on the progress of the Song of Ice & Fire TV series filming, which is being done in Belfast. I’ll have more information on that later in the weekend (and hopefully an interview with George for Salon Futura).

I don’t actually know a lot about the TV series right now. As I confessed to Parris, I had a quick look at the casting, saw that Sean Bean was involved, and stopped paying attention as I knew all I needed to know. I gather I’m not alone in this, though Parris tells me that the young actors cast as the Stark kids and Jon Snow are all unbearably cute and liable to set young hearts a-flutter across the world.

I was able to test this theory. Joining us for lunch were George’s German agent and publisher, Venor, and his two twenty-something daughters. Who did the young ladies want to see? Sean Bean, of course. I rest my case. But I’m sure Parris will be proved right in the long run.

I promised you a post on the Equalities and Human Rights Commission’s new report, How Fair is Britain? Here it is.

As I mentioned on Monday, mostly the report has little to say about the status of trans people in Britain because the EHRC does not have sufficient data to draw any conclusions. This isn’t surprising. The numbers of trans people are very small, they are not a fashionable group of people to study, and even if surveys did ask respondents if they identified as trans many trans people would lie for fear of outing themselves. Nevertheless, there are a number of rather depressing comments.

On Crime

In a small study of the experience of 71 transgender people, over half said that they had experienced harassment, and a smaller proportion (12 people) said that they had been physically assaulted: a large amount of crime against this group appears to go unreported.

A survey of attitudes among 872 transgender people found that two-thirds felt confident that they would be treated appropriately by members of the police service as their acquired gender. However, around 1 in 5 of those who had had contact with the police (68/367) felt that they were treated inappropriately, with attacks against them not being taken seriously and inappropriate searches being carried out.

On Health Care

The ‘Patient Satisfaction with Transgender Services’ which surveyed the opinions and experiences of 647 individuals at all stages of treatment/transition, found that 1 in 7 transgender people who responded to the healthcare section of the satisfaction survey felt that they had been treated adversely by healthcare professionals because of their transgender status.

On Education

In the same survey, transgender students were identified as the group who secondary teachers think are least supported in school (with only 7% of secondary teachers saying that this is the case). Also, only 7% of secondary teachers say that their school is ‘very active’ in promoting equality and respect for transgender pupils.

Despite two-thirds of lesbian, gay and transgender secondary students reporting that they have been victims of often severe bullying (17% of those bullied reported having received death threats), most teachers say that their schools do little to very actively promote respect towards lesbian, gay and transgender young people.

On Employment

Given the size of the transgender population, national survey evidence is unable to shed light on their economic position. However, a small 2008 survey of 71 respondents by the Scottish Transgender Alliance found that among respondents there was a high unemployment rate with 37% (N=26) receiving out of work benefits. There was also a high reported self-employment rate at 20% (N=14) perhaps because some members of the transgender community avoid situations where they do not have control over their work environment and the people with whom they have day-to-day contact.

There is very limited information about the economic position of the transgender population in the labour market, although research suggests that it is not favourable. A small-scale Scottish study (with 71 respondents) found that 55% of transgendered people had an HND/degree or postgraduate degree, but only 30% had a gross annual income of over £20,000, and almost half had a gross annual income of under £10,000.

Although little empirical work has been done in the area of employment for transgender people, it is reported in qualitative research and small-scale survey work that the employment sphere is the space in which transgender people face the most significant and pervasive levels of discrimination.

As a consequence of harassment and bullying 1 in 4 transgender people will feel obliged to change their jobs.

On housing

For transgender people, housing problems or crises can be related to aggression from neighbours and/or others in the local area, or the breakup of families on discovering a member of the family is transgender. These experiences may trigger a housing crisis or lead to homelessness.

I’m not posting this in the hope you folks will feel sorry for me. I know I have been very lucky. I have a home of my own, a decent income, and a wonderfully supportive relationship. But I have been through times when my annual income was in 4 figures (and I was afraid to go to social services for help). I have been through times when suicide seemed like a logical option. It is a bad place to be in, and there are many people in the UK, and around the world, who are in that place now.

Of course there are very many people who are much more seriously disadvantaged because they live in extreme poverty. But this is such a small problem in comparison to their plight. It is a problem that would be largely solved if we, as a society, would just change our attitudes. The economic cost is pitifully small.

So what can we as individuals can do about this? Trans people are such a small and despised minority that they are mostly off the political radar. Writing to your MP won’t help a lot. What we can do, however, is challenge opinions. The main reason why trans people are such a disadvantaged group is that politicians are afraid to do anything to help them. And that’s because when trans people are featured in the media it is generally either as the butt of jokes, or because some journalist is outraged that anything at all is done to support “perverts”. While those media attitudes exist, trans people will always be a political scapegoat rather than a protected group.

So next time you hear or see someone trashing trans people in public, do me a favor and challenge it, please.

You might also read this article by Matt Cheney, which I think is wonderful. If we were less obsessed with gender, and the maintenance of male superiority, we would be a lot less terrified by people who don’t fit our neat social boxes.

Update: For comparison, the National Center for Transgender Equality today issued a report on trans people’s access to health care in the USA. It makes horrific reading. The headline statistic is that 19% of respondents to the survey (of 6450 people) were refused care outright.

Over at Torque Control Niall Harrison has embarked on a project to give more publicity to science fiction written by women (and Goddess knows it needs it). Amongst other parts of the project, he wants people to email him with their lists of the 10 best SF novels by women in the past 10 years. Here are some possibilities:

• Light Music, In War Times – Kathleen Ann Goonan
• Silver Screen, Mappa Mundi, Natural History, Living Next Door to the God of Love, The Quantum Gravity series – Justina Robson
• The Archangel Protocol series – Lyda Morehouse
• Ghost Sister, Empire of Bones, Poison Master, Banner of Souls – Liz Williams
• Solitaire – Kelley Eskridge
• The Speed of Dark – Elizabeth Moon
• Memory – Linda Nagata
• The Etched City – K.J. Bishop
• Mindworlds – Phyllis Gotlieb
• Maul – Tricia Sullivan
• Spin State, Spin Control – Chris Moriarty
• Not Before Sundown – Johanna Sinisalo
• The Year of Our War – Steph Swainston
• The Wess’har Wars series – Karen Travis
• Dreamhunter, Dreamquake – Elizabeth Knox
• The Burning Girl – Holly Phillips
• Hav – Jan Morris
• Spirit – Gwyneth Jones
• Boneshaker – Cherie Priest
• FEED – Seanan McGuire
• The Hunger Games series – Suzanne Collins
• Who Fears Death – Nnedi Okorafor
• Carnival – Elizabeth Bear
• The Green Glass Sea, White Sands, Red Menace – Ellen Klages
• Warchild, Karin Lowachee
• Moxyland, Lauren Beukes

There are, of course, many more. I’ve limited myself to books I have read and am considering for my list. Note that the definition of “science fiction” needs to take into account that fact that Perdido Street Station won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, which is why books like The Year of Our War and The Etched City appear here, event though they are often classed as fantasy.

Narrowing this down to 10 is going to be hard.

Today is International Coming Out Day. You can expect to see a lot of LGB people writing happy blog posts about what a positive experience coming out is, and how more people should do it. It is a wonderful, uplifting event. Posts by trans people, in contrast, will probably be rather less common, and not just because there are fewer trans people.

As Hal Duncan noted during the recent Salon Futura podcast on writing LGBT characters, social attitudes towards LGB people have softened considerably over his lifetime. That’s not true everywhere in the world, as yesterday’s reports from Serbia make all too plain. But conditions for trans people, even in the West, are far less friendly. A report by the Equalities and Human Rights Commission titled How Fair is Britain? was issued today. Mostly what it has to say about trans people is “we don’t know” because there are so few of them, and they are so rarely studied, but what evidence it does have suggests that they are more discriminated against than any other group included in the report. I’ll comment on this in more detail another day.

On October 1st a new Equality Act came into effect in the UK. Mostly this is a very good thing that extends and consolidates rights for various disadvantaged groups in society. For trans people, however, it took rights away. In direct contravention of the existing Gender Recognition Act, the Equality Act states that trans people who have completed gender transition are not to be legally regarded as persons of their desired gender. It states that all trans people can be legally discriminated against in a wide variety of ways. I can legally be denied work and housing, thrown out of pubs and restaurants, denied service in shops, and denied access to transport services, simply because someone else says that they find my presence offensive. The right of other people to do these things to me is enshrined in UK law.

This new law is almost certainly in contravention of both British and European Human Rights legislation, but in the absence of a successful test case it still stands. Given the existence of such legislation, it is unsurprising that trans people are unwilling to be open about their status (though from what I recall of reading early drafts, the Equality Act makes concealing your trans status during a job application a criminal offense).

The argument for coming out is, of course, that the LGBT community needs role models. Gareth Thomas is doing a wonderful job in the rugby world, and the It Gets Better campaign on YouTube is providing much needed emotional support to frightened LGBT teens.

Trans people can be role models too. Chaz Bono has lent his support to the It Gets Better campaign. A potential role model in the UK is Nadia Almada, the Portuguese woman who won Big Brother. Judging from this interview with my friend Christine Burns, Nadia is a bubbly, confident person with a positive outlook on life. She’s busy setting up a new business. But the interview also touches on her suicide attempt following the recent Ultimate Big Brother show, which re-united past winners.

When Nadia was first on Big Brother, her housemates were unaware of her trans status. The programme’s producers played this up to the viewers, who were let in on the secret. That was part of the “entertainment”. For the reunion show, everyone knew about Nadia’s background. As this interview reveals, Nadia’s housemates were allowed to bully her, and this bullying was edited out by the TV company, thereby avoiding the outcry that resulted from the racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty, and making Nadia seem ill-tempered and hysterical to the viewers. This too was part of the “entertainment”. You can say this was all Nadia’s fault for wanting to be on TV, but putting yourself forward in that way is exactly what being a role-model is all about. You can’t inspire anyone if you keep yourself private.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all you were risking was yourself. Unfortunately homophobic and transphobic bullies don’t content themselves with persecuting the objects of their hatred. They often turn their attention to the families of those people too. You may have noticed that I have been rather more open about my own status of late. That’s because I am no longer living with my mother, and her home is no longer at risk of being vandalized simply because I live there.

The average age of gender transition in the UK is apparently around 40. That, I am sure, is an historical artifact. It makes no sense to transition at that age. Those people who want to transition are generally well aware that they are trans when they are at school. The longer you wait, the more time hormones have to make their mark on your body. The younger you can transition, the better. But until recently very few people have had the courage to go through gender transition, let alone come out.

So we currently have a society in which trans people are going through transition in late middle age. Many of them will have married earlier in life in order to appear “normal”, or in an attempt to “cure” themselves of their feelings, just as gay people did in my parents’ generation. Some will have children. If they go public about their trans status, they put their families at risk.

Finally there is the whole question of what it means to be “out” as a trans person. As I have explained elsewhere, there are many different types of trans people. Some are adamant that they are neither male nor female, and are very happy to be identified as something else. Others, however, want nothing more than to be accepted as ordinary members of the gender in which they feel they belong. For them, being out as a trans person means that they can never have that acceptance. It means that people will forever be seeing them as “really” a member of the gender they hate being seen as belonging to. It means admitting to themselves that they can never have the life that they dreamed of as children. For some it is an admission that their lives have been a failure.

Despite the desperate need for positive role models, trans people are very reluctant to come out. I regret that, but I very much understand where they are coming from, and I will try never to condemn anyone for failing to do so. I hope you won’t either.

The Indian Premier League has been one of the biggest sporting success stories of recent years. International stars from all over the world have come to play for Indian club sides. The matches have frequently been nail-biters, and league championships hard fought. The league even survived having to play in South Africa one year due to security concerns in India. Now, however, the whole edifice threatens to fall apart thanks to a degree of high-handed autocracy of a type we are used to seeing from the Pakistan Cricket Board.

The IPL does have some fairly high profile concerns about the legitimacy of business operations. Lalit Modi, the marketing genius who spearheaded the league for its first three years, is now under investigation by Interpol for alleged money laundering. It is not entirely clear, however, whether Modi has really done anything particularly wrong, or whether he is being singled out for special attention because he has offended important people in the Indian government.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has taken firm control of the IPL with a view to cleaning it up. But in doing so they seem to have lost sight of what a sporting league is all about: teams and players. A successful sporting business has many elements. Quality players, exciting games, TV revenue, quality marketing: these are all important components. But the key components that sporting leagues need to have are teams: groups of players who acquire reputations and supporters. If teams are not allowed to establish themselves, they don’t grow their support bases, and they have difficulty making money.

You see this sort of thing occasionally in the USA, for example when franchises move from one city to another. Loyal San José Earthquakes fans, for example, were furious when Major League Soccer took away our hugely successful team and forced them to play in Houston instead. Finding enthusiasm for the replacement Earthquakes team, with a very different squad of players, that we were given a few years later was difficult.

The BCCI has lost sight of the importance of teams in a number of ways. For example, this year they have required the teams to relinquish most of their players and rebuild their squads almost from scratch in a new auction. A certain amount of control over team composition is useful, otherwise you get a few rich teams dominating the league, as happens in European soccer. The draft systems used in US sports, and transfer regulations, are methods that sporting authorities use to counteract this.

Destroying every team in the league, however, is a very different matter. It was very obvious at the end of this year’s Champions’ League that the players of the victorious Chennai Super Kings were upset that they would never get to play together again. Supporters of all IPL clubs have little idea who will be playing for their teams next year. The BCCI, it seems, does not care as long as it can make lots of money out of a big player auction.

Today the BCCI dropped a bombshell. Citing financial and contract irregularities, they have wound up two of the IPL franchises, including the Rajasthan Royals, who won the inaugural league back in 2008. The owners of the affected teams have expressed shock and surprise, and owners of other teams are clearly worried.

It may well be that some of the charges laid against the Rajasthan and Punjab franchises are indeed justified. Given the allegations being thrown around, it would not surprise me if other teams had also done things for which punishments might be handed out. But you can deal with such things using fines and handicapping of teams. The severity of the BCCI’s action suggests that they have no concern for the many cricket fans who follow the league, and raises suspicions that they have ulterior motives.

You see, the BCCI has recently allowed two new teams into the IPL. The suspicion has to be that the BCCI, having pocketed fat buy-in fees from the new teams, and faced with the need to organize a new season with the expanded league, decided to find an excuse to kick out two of the existing teams. It has not escaped my notice that the two teams that have been chosen as scapegoats are both owned by high-profile Bollywood actresses: Preity Zinta and Shilpa Shetty.

If experience with the PCB is anything to go by, what will happen now is that legal threats will be liberally bandied around, “negotiations” will take place, and suddenly the two miscreant teams will be forgiven and allowed back into the competition. This will do nothing to allay fears of corruption in the IPL. It will do quite the opposite.